Pathfinder Legends: Rise of the Runelords: Burnt Offerings

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Pathfinder is an iteration of the popular game Dungeons & Dragons. In recent years, there has been a trend for game sessions to be broadcast on the internet; this is quite a different thing, a scripted audio play that uses the setting of the game to tell a fantasy story. There are a few pieces of narration, delivered in character by the party wizard as he writes in his journal, but, otherwise, it's a regular full-cast audio, with sound effects, music and so on to tell the story alongside the actors.

The acting is good (although I found the fighter's accent rather odd), and the script effective, with some good lines here and there. But, for me, at least, it suffers because what it's trying to do isn't something the format is suited for. And what it's trying to do is adapt a published scenario (of the same title) and turn it into a play.

So what we get feels very much like a low-level D&D scenario - because that's exactly what it originally was. You can tell that it was probably quite a good scenario; there are some good NPCs in here and opportunities for more than simply bashing the monsters. But as a play, this approach results in two main failings. For one, it's difficult to follow what's going on in the fight scenes, which, as is the nature of D&D scenarios, comprise a significant chunk of the story. Audio isn't terribly well-suited for action, although this makes a good effort, and it doesn't detract as much as it might.

The bigger issue, though, is that a scenario, by its nature, has to be agnostic as to who the central characters will be (beyond them being adventurers). And so it is here; the story isn't really about the protagonists, and it's hard to care about them. A couple of them do get a few lines about their background, so they aren't entirely cyphers, but the villain gets more backstory than they do. Moreover, it's unlikely we're going to get much more in future instalments because the format itself precludes that. They're unconnected from the plot because that's how the original source material had to be written.

In fairness, this is probably about as good as it could be, given that it's trying to adapt something written for an entirely different medium with different needs. The production values are good and the story decent... but as an audio play, it just falls a little flat.